muddle-headed mutterings

This was a piece I originally wrote for theBella Caledoniablog – the original entry and context can be viewedhere.

George Osborne at the October 2013 Conservative Party Conference outlined fresh plans to force long-term unemployed social security claimants to undertake mandatory unwaged work. The specific details may have been relatively new, but the tenor of these proposals is in keeping with an increasingly widespread approach in our culture to the notion of work, that ongoing welfare reforms being pushed through by recent successive Westminster governments have routinely typified.

What is notable and concerning about these reforms and the many variations on the by now well-worn theme of the ‘striver/shirker’ inflected rhetoric that accompanies them, is that they aggressively promote and rely upon a general public accepting a view of human beings as fundamentally predisposed to ‘shirking’ unless someone looms over them wielding a big metaphorical stick.

Furthermore, they promote a view that work (as specifically defined and designated by our dominant corporate-interest led, Westminster-dominated political discourse) is a virtue and worthwhile end in and of itself. Not only this, but that work and the willingness or ability to undertake it, is the utmost measure of human value. This in turn has hugely damaging ramifications for how vulnerable social groups are perceived by wider society, and not least for chronically ill and disabled people, many of whom already face significant barriers to finding and maintaining employment, whilst also having to contend with the effects of frequent cruel and inaccurate portrayals in mainstream media narratives as a bunch of workshy fakers and scroungers.

These portrayals both arise out of, and also help to further bolster this apparent growing public acceptance that work must at all costs be undertaken for its own sake, as a moral duty, regardless of your impairments, and without expectation of either an adequate living wage or basic job security in return. Doesn’t there come a point when we have to ask ourselves: is this really a direction we want to continue to be headed in?

Meanwhile it seems we’re also in danger of rapidly losing sight of the notion of work as being worthwhile if, and only if it can provide the following essential elements: basic security, adequate remuneration, social inclusion, human cooperation and personal meaning as well as preferably ongoing value to our wider communities. After all, these are usually the kinds of ingredients which allow work to be at the very least bearable, or perhaps satisfying, and even, if we’re really fortunate, enjoyable too. If we’re prepared to continually surrender these values on behalf of people already struggling with the various unenviable array of social, economic, health, and self-esteem issues which typically accompany long-term joblessness, we’re also contributing to the steady erosion of these values for the majority of the rest of us in the longer term.

Or might it just be that some of the apparent populist voter appeal of coercive and punitive unwaged labour initiatives such the latest unveiled by Osborne derives from the fact that work in its current form as experienced by significant numbers, often isn’t all that marvellous either, falls short of meeting our basic human requirements, and thus encourages us to be both terrified and secretly envious of the idea of anyone else being potentially ‘let off the hook’ too easily? But if this is the case, does clamouring for the some of the UK’s lowest status and most socially excluded individuals to be forced to do unwaged labour really do anything at all to raise the bar for employment conditions across the UK generally? It would seem incredibly unlikely that this could ever be an effective strategy, that is if promoting better and fairer working conditions is to remain any sort of priority for us as a society anymore.

And it is, after all, pretty disturbing that we’re allowing ‘work’ to be defined as the ultimate virtue and measure of personal value especially whilst so many with current jobs maybe aren’t all that wild about what they do to either. And no, not due to any innate propensity to idleness, but more to do with a healthy and justifiable wish to resist encroaching, enforced meaninglessness.

We need to have the courage to explore and generate solutions which don’t begin with a cynical view of human beings as fundamentally feckless if not sufficiently coerced. When it comes down to it, people generally don’t ‘shirk’ wanting to have increased financial independence, or improved living standards, or a sense of purpose, or to meaningfully contribute to and be included in their wider communities when those opportunities are presented to them and can be chosen freely. If you want to motivate people, at the very least try and persuade them that what they’re doing matters, not just insist they present themselves as busy looking busy in order to satisfy some distorted and misguided sense of spite-fuelled propriety.

As it is, any welfare policy approach that proceeds from the idea that people are inherently disinclined towards meaningful and rewarding work is always going to look an awful lot like an exercise in bad faith.